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Tag: Department of Religious Studies

Teach Your Students Active Reading: Assign Texts in Blackboard with Hypothesis

bookshelves that spell the word "read"

by Lauren Horn Griffin, Department of Religious Studies Your Blackboard course menu includes Hypothesis on your “build content” menu. Hypothesis works with files you add to your course. It also works with any website. Hypothesis is a teaching tool that allows you to have your students “show” how they are reading your course content. With the Hypothesis tool, anyone in the course may add annotations with text, images, websites, and LaTeX equations. Anyone in the course can reply to those […]

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Webcameras that Facilitate Better Conversations Virtual Guests: Perhaps “OWL” Being See You…??

OWL camera in carrying case

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies What is this? Have you tried using a basic computer web camera to capture conversations in a classroom? Prof. Loewen has experimented with dozens of methods since 2009. With the arrival of the REL digital lab at UA’s Department of Religious Studies in 2021, things have changed. Among the digital tools being collected by Prof. Jeri Wieringa is the OWL Pro, which is a 360-degree camera, mic, and speaker combined into one device. […]

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Power-Using and Hacking Blackboard

Teaching Hub

by Nathan Loewen, Department of Religious Studies Do you use Blackboard in your course? I do. Here’s why: I think it’s easier for me, as well as the students, to have a simple, one-stop place to find and do everything related to a course outside of class. Now beginning my second year of teaching at UA, I find my commitment to grasping the basic features of Blackboard has made my teaching much more manageable. Furthermore, as faculty technology liaison for the College of Arts and Sciences, […]

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A ‘Hipster’s’ Introduction to Religion

Full lecture in Theatre L, Newman Building, UCD

In “A ‘Hipster’s’ Introduction to the Study of Religion,” Nathan Loewen talks about his approach to teaching REL 100 and the academic study of religion: My class sessions are structured as active learning based critical inquiries into how public and scholarly discourses deploy grammar and terms to frame “religion,” where examples from the everyday interact with those from religious studies scholars. And so while the course includes a few lectures, several mini-lectures and many lecture-discussions to establish baseline arguments, students largely find themselves […]

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Film Course Studies Religion in Popular Culture

Instructor: Matthew Bagger Course: REL 360: Popular Culture/Cultural Humanities Audience: Undergraduates Offered each semester, this one-credit hour course requires students to attend four monthly films along with either the Day Lecture or the Aronov Lecture, and then to write a small number of brief commentaries on these events/issues, some of which appear on the department’s blog. The fall 2015 theme was “Selling Religion: Religion and Entrepreneurial Practice,” and students viewed Spirited Away, Elmer Gantry, Kumaré, and the video discussed in this year’s Day Lecture. […]

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